Amazing ideas~! But I think there’s a better way for the 3rd part in the tutor to use the plain effector to control Clone Elements’ complex animation with fall-off range, by “blend mode” of clone. and with this way it’s able to enable Render Instance of clone which is very importent for massive amount of clones.

With regard to the resetting of weights using the plain effector, “guessing” at setting the weight slider in Falloff tab to 200% or 300% to get weights back in range is slightly non-scientific (and Weight transformations are not that straightforward and isn’t necessarily linear)

All you have to do is set the Max% slider to 0% in the “reset” plain effector (BUT the Weight Transform should still be 100%), i.e. the “reset” plain effector should have 100% influence on weight, but set the value to 0% (=Max% slider value)

An alternative (but you do need v18) is the new reeffector, which is almost made for this. In the reeffector, untick all parameters except Weight and leave Weight slider at 100%. This will reset weight back to 0%. In fact, the reeffector is good way to organise the whole stack – each layer pair in this tutorial could be put in their own reeffector (so you end up with a reffector stack in the cloner) and you probably wouldn’t even need the “weight reset” at all as reeffectors can completely overwrite previous effectors (use reeffector falloff to determine influence)